Cersei's sleeve embroidery - 3.0

Third time's the charm?  I hope?!  I've started and abandoned two different sleeve embroideries for this costume so far.  You know how you become obsessed with certain costumes?  This is one of those.  And that meant that no matter how hard I tried I just couldn't go with 2.0 because I wasn't feeling it. So I got on the crazy train and looked at tons of images of the embroidery Michele Carrigher did and realized a few things:
  • Nearly every Cersei gown has lions on it.
  • Despite not seeing any lions on the blurry screencaps I got of the gown I started to have a hunch they were there.
  • When in doubt go back to Michele's website, all you need to know is there, including how she does it all.
So when I looked back at the website I came to the realization that this design has a similar curving shape with little circle in the middle as the screencap.

screencap



I also know that had the velvet gown on the right this was custom printed with the Lannister sigil.  The other main dress she wears in mourning is a black velvet with golden swords printed on it and the dress she wears in the trial-by-combat has sword shapes AND a big honkin' lion head.  So I decided to do a modified version of the design above but with swords since there are sword-like shapes in the screencap and on both other mourning gowns. It won't be screen accurate, but it's so much more in keeping with what I feel the real design on that gown will turn out to be, it just makes sense to me.  And it's kind of freeing and fun to do my own thing! I went back to Michele's website and looked at her step by step for embroidering the similar design and then I got to work. First I printed out color versions of the above wedding gown design at about the right scale.  Then I put the print out of the screencap under the wedding gown one and put the whole thing on the light table and merged the two designs together.  I ended up with this:

 lion

 I covered my drawing with a sheet of plastic to protect it, covered that with black silk organza, then pinned the whole shebang with pushpins onto a piece of pink insulation foam we had lying around, because we're crafty that way.  Then I used my trusty Lumiere metallic paint and a tiny brush to paint the design onto the silk.  And again for the other shoulder!

 paint

It worked like a charm.  Once it was dry I hooped it and got to work.  While Michele Carrigher embroiders the whole design first THEN beads and embellishes lazy old me thought I could get away with mostly just beading and couching, so that's what I've started on.  I don't know if it looks like much on the screen but I'm happy with where it's going.  This is made up of gold glass seed beads, faceted gold beads, two sizes of gold bullion, gold embroidery thread, gold Italian mesh, and some very narrow gold braided trim from JoAnns.  The area under the lions arms and inbetween them and the circle will be filled with gold and bronze jumprings and then scattered seed beads will be sewn to the dress around the design to tie it all together.

 cerseibeading

 The design inside the circle is supposed to be Casterly Rock (solid gold don't you know) I changed the design a bit and am going to cover everything else in the circle with black seed beads,  and there will be fancy metallic aiglets hanging down as "swords" from the pointy bits beneath the lions.  Not including the painting this took about 4 hours.  I'm having way more fun with this than I thought I would and realized it's kind of like doodling, freehand embroidery/beading is so much more freeing and fun for me than the counted stuff!

Comments

  1. Gorgeous! You're inspiring me to get off my duff and embroider some dragons!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks! It's been a fun project. I'd love to see your dragons!

      Delete

Post a Comment